A Feasible Goal
Last year, I began reading books from the Personal MBA Recommended Reading List, a collection of 100 best books about business. One of the books I read was The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu Goldratt. It is a “business novel,” which means it presents didactic business-related ideas in a narrative form. I quickly read The Goal, its sequel, and most of the other business novels authored by Goldratt, his collaborators, and his imitators.
Goldratt’s books were inspiring, but left me with a lack of actionable information. I didn’t truly understand the ideas he was recommending, much less how to implement them in the workplace. As others have noted, sometimes the very people who create powerful new ideas are not the best people to explain and spread their ideas.
If I was just interested in business, this would have been a little annoying but not the end of the world. After all, I’m not especially interested in the places where his books are set, manufacturing and retail businesses. But I understood Goldratt to be saying that his ideas did not apply solely to business. As Goldratt’s life and career progressed, The Theory of Constraints became generalized into something called the “Logical Thinking Process”- a series of thinking tools that would help diagnose and resolve problems in any system at all.
